While discussing Chrissy Teigen quitting Twitter after spending the past decade as one of the most popular users of the social media platform where she used her quick wit and comedic timing to parlay her modeling career into a successful line of cookbooks and cookware, The View co-host Meghan McCain launched into a diatribe on cyber-bullying, which she herself has experienced on Twitter. However, where McCain gets into trouble, as she often does, is equating herself with the topic of the day, and in this case, her situation is markedly different than Teigen’s.
Via Mediaite:
I was trending on Twitter yesterday. I don’t think it’s ever been positive. It’s always something negative. It’s not just random people. It’s people with blue checkmarks and I don’t need a pity party. I said yesterday there’s no crying in baseball. I’ve chosen to do this work, this is not indentured servitude. I’m the one conservative woman in all of mainstream television. I’m the only one left. With that, I’m saying things that are not said in an echo chamber. I say things that people just don’t want to hear, and if they disagree with me, it automatically becomes personal about how fat I am, I’m a disgusting white woman of privilege, I only get anywhere because of my dad. Everything you guys have already said, it’s not anything I haven’t thought and felt and been insecure about for my whole life.
It’s true that online harassment is a serious problem that tech platforms have failed to adequately address. Teigen has been repeatedly attacked for every little thing she tweets and has recently been the target of QAnon accusations, which involved allegations about her family that go beyond the pale and Twitter did very little to stop it.
McCain, on the other hand, was trending on Wednesday for a very different reason. She made extremely controversial remarks on The View about how race and gender shouldn’t factor into hiring decisions, which many people noted is a hypocritical thing for her to say considering her career has been built on being the daughter of a late senator and presidential candidate. Does McCain deserve to have her weight mocked? No, of course not. But is it unusual or purposefully nefarious that she trended after making racially-charged remarks about how an Asian American host couldn’t do her job better than her? Also, no.
Of course, the best response came from Joy Behar who sympathized with Teigen, and perhaps threw a little shade at her co-host in the process. “There comes a time in everyone’s life when they ask themselves, ‘Is this job worth the aggravation?’” Behar said. “I ask myself that question on a regular basis.” We wonder why.
(Via The View)